But a more scalable solution involves leveraging the embedded sensors in cars already using HD maps to navigate. “Today, many high-end vehicles not only have LTE connections but an array of advanced sensors on them; a forward-looking camera, forward and rear radar, and we’re working with numerous OEMs on getting that sensor data transmitted into our cloud,” said Sood. That’s going to mean millions of data points being constantly uploaded to the cloud, where Here’s servers will do the heavy lifting of making sense out of it all.

“We have machine learning algorithms and aggregation algorithms that sift through that data and try distilling changes from noise or aberrations in the world. Once we’ve detected those changes we update the map and then deploy that to the vehicle,” explained Sood.

[Mary] Cummings argues that companies like Google and Facebook could outpace militaries when it comes to the science of artificial intelligence, which in turn could lead to potentially dangerous technologies going into use before they have been properly tested.

Public transportation users in Washington, DC, can now hitch a ride on a self-driving, 3D-printed bus.

Olli, created by Arizona-based Local Motors, officially hit the streets of the nation’s capital Thursday. Using an app similar to Uber or Lyft, ride-seekers can order the bus to pick them up and drop them off at their destinations of choice.

Some companies have done exploration of truck automation. Daimler/Freightliner has been testing trucks in Nevada. Volvo (trucks and cars together) has done truck and platooning experiments, notably the Sartre project some years ago. A recent group of European researchers did a truck demonstration in the Netherlands, leading up to the Declaration of Amsterdam which got government ministers to declare a plan to modify regulations to make self-driving systems legal in Europe.

A flurry of videos made by Tesla drivers has appeared on YouTube, demonstrating the car’s new Autopilot features. We see the road through the POV of the (male) driver-author, who narrates the scene in voiceover — interpreting what the software is doing. Each clip culminates in a “close call,” with the implication that the software is to blame ("Tesla Autopilot tried to kill me!" reads one headline). In nearly every video, the driver is misusing the technology — a possibility the company had not apparently considered. Aghast at the behavior of these drivers, Elon Musk announced that new constraints will be added to the software “to minimize the possibility of people doing crazy things with it.”

For highly automated vehicles to gain broad acceptance in society, they must provide for a comfortable and familiar driving experience. HERE Humanised Driving uses actual driver behaviour data to instruct the vehicle on how to drive more like a human and less like a robot.

some models of robocar in the future will be incredibly cheap. Particularly the “city cars” which never go on the highway and only carry one to two people. With simple electric drivetrains they will be easy to build and maintain, and eventually their battery cost will become very reasonable. The dashboard vanishes along with many other controls. The expensive sound system vanishes. The windshields need not be a large custom piece of curved glass — in fact they don’t even have to exist other than for passenger comfort. The parts count goes down significantly.